Sudden loss of half my Moz rankings
-
My Moz Pro report from Sunday shows I have lost ranking on about half of the 1000+ keyword phrases I track. Most of these drops are of the order of 50 places or more. But 6 went up and the rest stayed the same. I see no corresponding drop in Google search traffic or Google search impressions. So how do I read this?
About a week ago I switched my travel website to a premium theme and removed indexing on my Wordpress attachment pages. In the week since, There is no manual penalty visible. The new theme increased my page speed from C to A, so I thought it would help my rankings. Now I don't know what to think.
My website is http://www.asiantraveltips.com
-
No responses so I'm guessing no-one really knows what the answer is? FYI my rankings have started to recover since early December, with about half back to where they were and traffic at about 40% of pre-drop figures. Still no real understanding of why it happened or what I did (if anything) to start the recovery process.
-
I notice my Moz Rankings report from yesterday shows I've regained about one third of my rankings but my search traffic has not increase yet. I'm hoping it was just a glitch and it will recover in full, but I don't know. I was about to ditch my new theme (which makes the site 10-15% faster and much better mobile experience) and return to my old theme when I saw the Moz report.
Would still like to get some input from experts as I see a lot of people now complaining about this on the GWT support forum (including myself).
-
It seems my "rookie mistake" is not the real issue. I rectified this problem three days ago, my URLs are listed in Google but I still have less than 10% of the traffic I had a week or so ago.
The decline started on 24 November, so it's hard to connect it to the Phantom 2 update on 19(?) November? Would Google collapse my traffic that fast and take this long to send me traffic again after just 4-5 days of index blocking? I wouldn't have thought so. And I think the drop occurred just before I migrated to the new site template, but not sure. Nothing in console to suggest anything is wrong except index numbers were lower than I'd expected.
Anyone else able to see anything (e.g. in code) that could be causing this? It's a real disappointment as I'd just started to get some real solid SERP traction on this site following the domain name change a year ago.
-
Stupid rookie mistake! I made all the changes in my development environment and copied the files and database to production with "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" still checked! Hopefully the damage is not long-lasting as I had been doubling my Google search traffic month on month for the past three months.
-
Hey there! I just had a look in your campaign and from spot checking it does seem that the drop in ranking is being reported accurately by using Rank Tracker and also doing some manual searches as well.
As far as to what impact of changing the theme and and removing indexing, I can't say for certain what impact this would have so I'll let an SEO expert answer those questions
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Webpage is not ranking
https://www.nextheadphone.com/oneodio-a10-hybrid-review/ I just published a new article. Keyword is : OneOdio A10 Hybrid Review Before writing the article, I researched that This is Easy keyword. I should rank as soon as I publish the article. After publishing the article my Current rank is #32 Why its not ranking? Any idea
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NextHeadphone0 -
Not ranking
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharonEKG
so our website (www.18brandz.com) has been up for 8 months now and has not been ranking yet, we are indexing, moz crawler SEO issues are regularly fixed and we are down to about 25 non major issues, i started using google lighthouse to optimize and had made changes. we post GOOD quality in house written unique content, we follow an SEO templet of guideline i wrote for titles/meta title tags, structure, site speed has been optimized and as for the moment we rank A OR B with no major issues on all speed checking sites possible (gtmetrix/google speed insights/ webspeed... etc) but nothing. and i cant figure out why we wont rank, our field of digital marketing is a tough one and very competitive , i know, yet not ranking for so long seems odd. our only know fact major disadvantage is the lack of links and no link building strategy. any suggestions? any idea?1 -
Discrepancy in keyword ranking from webmasters and actual ranking.
I have been tracking ranks of some keywords important to my business since the last 2 months. Recently I have observed that, for one of my keywords, google webmasters is giving the avg position as 8 but when i search in google it comes in the 6th page. I know that webmasters tools gives the average position but i do not think there will be such big difference in the ranks. Please help.Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seomoz12320 -
Optimized Page Not Ranking for Head Term
We have a primary donation page that we've tried to position well for the term 'Donate' and some of its longer-tailed derivatives. The page has plenty of high-quality backlinks and internal links, and hasn't had any manual actions taken against it. The backlink profile is fairly good from what I can tell, definitely not mainly spam. The issue is that it doesn't rank for 'Donate', at all really. For 'Donate Online' and 'Donate Canada', it ranks roughly #3-4 across major Canadian cities, but we're not even in the top 100 for 'Donate'. There are pages and domains that are way less optimized, with much weaker backlink profiles, that are ranking well ahead of us. It's not a noindex or robots problem, as the page ranks fine for many other terms. We also have a strong domain with around 660k backlinks according to MajesticSEO. Here's the URL in question: http://www.redcross.ca/donate I'm hoping someone can help us diagnose what could be going wrong with this term specifically and how we can get this page into the SERPs where it belongs. Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalcrc0 -
Trouble ranking
I have a site that got messed over pretty hard by a BigCommerce issue. They used to rank but then Big Commerce had a glitch that set every page on the site to a https which was auto set, by their system, to not be indexed. This caused the entire site to go missing. It was then fixed by me, only to have the same glitch happen again. I again fixed it, and BigCommerce released a patch to resolve the issue. They admitted blame to my client and said it can take a while to resolve. It has been a few months now, and google is slowly recrawling the site. It has about half the pages indexed. The pages that are indexed do not rank at all. I was wondering if you guys see any major flags that would cause this or if it is still related to the big commerce glitch. link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Finding writers with author rank
Hi i'm interested in finding writers who have author rank (Like Circles and Followers. ). What is the easiest way to find these writers online, is there any tools out there which can automate this finding process? Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Sudden Change In Indexed Pages
Every week I check the number of pages indexed by google using the "site:" function. I have set up a permanent redirect from all the non-www pages to www pages. When I used to run the function for the: non-www pages (i.e site:mysite.com), would have 12K results www pages (i.e site:www.mysite.com) would have about 36K The past few days, this has reversed! I get 12K for www pages, and 36K for non-www pages. Things I have changed: I have added canonical URL links in the header, all have www in the URL. My questions: Is this cause for concern? Can anyone explain this to me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
How long for new pages to rank
Hi Guys, Our website has some really good serps for our established keyword phrases some of which are quite competitive. We recently acquired and have begun selling some new brands through our online shop and launched new pages for these brands around 2 months ago. They are quite competitive ("merrell shoes" and "timberland boots" for example in google.co.uk) terms. Do you think we should get some keyword rich links built into these new pages from external sites such as blogs - or is there chances of ranking well driven more off our overall site authority/link profile? In other peoples experience, what is a typical realistic timeframe to start getting meaningful serps on new pages/keyword phrases (I know that is hard to answer - but ball parks figures appreciated). Thank you everyone in advance. Kind Regards (and happy thanksgiving to our US friends)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield0